[Dspace-general] DSpace instances in the Webometrics repository ranking - January 2009 vs July 2009

[Bram Luyten]

Hi all,

Earlier today I saw that the Webometrics repository ranking for July 2009 is
finally online:
http://repositories.webometrics.info/top400_rep_inst.asp

A short introduction about the Webometrics Repository Ranking initiative:

The aim of the Ranking is to support Open Access initiatives and therefore
the free access to scientific publications in an electronic form and to
other academic material. The web indicators are used here to measure the
global visibility and impact of the scientific repositories.

A full description of the methodology is available here:
http://repositories.webometrics.info/methodology_rep.html

This afternoon I tried to compare some data from January to the new ranking
in July, thanks to some fine work on an excell sheet from Claudia Jürgen in
January. As there are some dramatic changes this time, I think the
methodology got tweaked, but I don't know exactly what the formula was last
time.
https://eldorado.tu-dortmund.de/handle/2003/26032

In january, 43 spots of the top 100 were DSpace repositories. From the ones
that were in the top 100 in january, 35 still are today. (Because the online
list doesn't have the platform indicated, it's unclear at this point how
many DSpaces are in the top 100).

>From the ones who were in the top 100 previously, the ranking of following
institutions improved (number of spots improved + name institution):

+2        Cornell University eCommons
+2        Kyushu University Institutional Repository
+2        National Library of Finland Dspace Services
+4        Ohio State University Knowledge Bank
+9        Digital CSIC
+10      Igitur Archive Universiteit Utrecht
+11      Universidade do Minho Repositorium
+12      Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya Upcommons
+17      Kyoto University Research Information Repository
+17      INIST I-Revues
+30      Biblioteca Digital Jurídica do Superior Tribunal de Justica
+31      Boston University Digital Research Archive
+39      University of Tokyo Repository
+41      Agecon Search Research in Agricultural and Applied Economics
+45      University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Ideals

Placed 25th both in January and in July, Georgia Tech is the only DSpace in
the same position.

Unfortunately, there were some DSpaces who dropped in the ranking, but are
still in the top 100

-47        Australian National University Dspace
-37        University of Adelaide Digital Library
-37        Oregon State University Scholarsarchive
-27        Diposit de la Recerca de Catalunya
-24        University of Oregon Scholars' Bank
-21        University of Calgary Dspace
-19        University of Bergen Open Research Archive
-18        Jet Propulsion Laboratory Beacon Espace
-16        Caltech Authors
-16        Universidad de los Andes Repositorio Institucional
-15        Leiden University Digital Repository
-15        Research in Atmosphere, Cryosphere, Hydrosphere and Solid Earth
Fields
-13        University of Michigan Deep Blue
-13        University of Toronto T Space
-10        Tartu University Library Dspace
-6          Waseda University Dspace
-6          University of Helsinki Ethesis
-5          Goteborg University Open Archive
-3          MIT Dspace

I was able to identify a few institutions who weren't in the top 100 before,
but are now (position - institution name - positions won):

55   Nagoya University Repository +49
82   Nagasaki University Academic Output +40
99   Rice University Scholarship +41

It would be great to hear from the top climbers, if they made certain
customizations or improved their repository in a certain way, to explain the
improvement in rank. At this point it's very hard to identify whether the
change in the algorithm is fully responsible for the changes, or whether
best practices at institutions could explain the changes.

To make a further analysis for your institution, it could be useful to
compare the 4 different metrics between July & January:

*Size (S)*. Number of pages recovered from the four largest engines: Google,
Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
*Visibility (V).* The total number of unique external links received
(inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search and
Exalead.
*Rich Files (R)*. Only the number of text files in Acrobat format (*.pdf*)
extracted from Google and Yahoo are considered.
*Scholar (Sc)*. Using Google Scholar database we calculate the mean of the
normalised total number of papers and those (recent papers) published
between 2001 and 2008.

You can see these metrics for july on the webometrics website, and in
Claudia's spreadsheet file here:
https://eldorado.tu-dortmund.de/handle/2003/26032

To conclude ... in the absolute top ten, there are no less than 6 DSpace
instances, while this was only 3 last time (position - institution name)
3    +10    Igitur Archive Universiteit Utrecht
4    +12    Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya Upcommons
5    -3       MIT Dspace
6    +41    Agecon Search Research in Agricultural and Applied Economics
7    +45    University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Ideals
10    +2    National Library of Finland Dspace Services

If you'd like to have my own spreadsheet file, in which I filled in the July
positions, please don't hesitate to ask and I'll be happy to send it to you.
If you think I made a mistake, or if you want to discuss this ranking,
please do, this could be interesting.

with kindest regards,

Bram Luyten

@mire - http://www.atmire.com

Technologielaan 9 - 3001 Heverlee - Belgium
533 2nd Street - Encinitas, CA 92024 - USA

http://www.togather.eu - Before getting together, get Tog at ther
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